For me, it's the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). It is intended to reduce/recycle waste from shipping packages.
The eyebrow-raising part is that each country has a registry at which every company that intends to ship goods (independent of size) must sign up. Plus, it has to look for a recycling company. Each year, the company has to give an estimate on what amount of packages it is going to use and pay the recycling cost for it beforehand. Both companies are then required to report that amount to the registry. At the end of the year, they report again, this time the actual amount of packaging used (you get the part of the fee back if you overpaid).
If you ship to other EU countries, you are required to register in similar registries in every single one of them. Plus, they have their own requirements to your packages and Austria, for example, wants you to appoint a representative who does the paperwork for you and takes liability (the EU is working on making the representative mandatory in general).
Needless to say that all this stuff does not come for free. The fees for postage, the registry, the adaptions to foreign regulations and all costs associated with it easily get over a thousand Euros. No problem for the big merchants, but I think you all can guess how well this pays off if you only have a handful of shipments from, say, Germany to Austria.
And that's why shops only ship to selected countries despite the EU having free movement of goods.
PS: Merchants from outside EU (e. g. Temu) don't have to do any of this.
Worst than that is that corporation leadership is crazy, they all screaming ai, thinking its a magic stick, sometimes they do manage to automate something but not realizing ai<>automation, every manager like to spread stories about ai and future processes while not realizing they still use excel and they are 20 years away from ai
The eyebrow-raising part is that each country has a registry at which every company that intends to ship goods (independent of size) must sign up. Plus, it has to look for a recycling company. Each year, the company has to give an estimate on what amount of packages it is going to use and pay the recycling cost for it beforehand. Both companies are then required to report that amount to the registry. At the end of the year, they report again, this time the actual amount of packaging used (you get the part of the fee back if you overpaid).
If you ship to other EU countries, you are required to register in similar registries in every single one of them. Plus, they have their own requirements to your packages and Austria, for example, wants you to appoint a representative who does the paperwork for you and takes liability (the EU is working on making the representative mandatory in general).
Needless to say that all this stuff does not come for free. The fees for postage, the registry, the adaptions to foreign regulations and all costs associated with it easily get over a thousand Euros. No problem for the big merchants, but I think you all can guess how well this pays off if you only have a handful of shipments from, say, Germany to Austria.
And that's why shops only ship to selected countries despite the EU having free movement of goods.
PS: Merchants from outside EU (e. g. Temu) don't have to do any of this.